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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 11, 2013, 13:03
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The Search for Ancestors on the Moor I see stones I think of reed-thatch, sod fires, post and ringbeams, The lives of people who lived here, the hair on their faces ... I see stones I dream of cattle, figures in file, thick hut-shadow, sooted women, a boy with a stick, a man with meat on his short back, fur-shod, self-conscious, unsure of his welcome, a conclave of elders, bickering, parley ... I see stones I see stones, one edge meeting another, upright, three stones together, a stone post fallen, a backstone, bedrock, hearthstone, and stones pushed out of alignment by turf weighted by stone, by water, turf and stone ... I see the stones of thirty huts scattered. I pick my way where walls were. I face the wind where hands and feet fretted. We trouble this place with buckets and pegs, tripods, stratigraphies and excavation, the rational grope of theories and spades. I climb to get away from sadness. I climb the hill and the hill falls away around me, The hilltop surges flat, is grass nibbled by sheep who run and stop and stare, the cairn is broken ... I cannot climb any higher The moor rotates before and behind me, waved and flickering and nicked by rock. I look for places, for accents, crinkles, habitation. I look for what will arrest looking I cannot climb any higher I see a windfarm and blueish space beyond which has the appearance of a sea beyond this sea. Skylarks, ponies, sheep, scurf the shoulders of decaying granite, runkled sheets of bog and sod pare each other to the horizon. I cannot climb any higher I cannot people the sky Jan Farquharson
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ryaner 679 posts |
Aug 11, 2013, 15:35
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Great stuff. Really enjoyed that.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Aug 20, 2013, 12:10
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The Soliloquies of a Chalk Giant The god is a graffito carved on the belly of the chalk, his savage gesture subdued by the stuff of his creation. He is taken up like a gaunt white doll by the round hills, wrapped around by the long pale hair of the fields. Jeremy Hooker moss has written more here.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Edited Aug 30, 2013, 13:29
Aug 30, 2013, 11:57
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Moon Cat has just posted over on the Pump the sad news that Seamus Heaney has died. Qual e' colui che somniando vede, che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede, cotal son io... Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII 'Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming And after the dream lives with the aftermath Of what he felt, no other trace remaining, So I live now', for what I saw departs And is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness Still drops from it into my inner heart. It is the same with snow the sun releases, The same as when in wind, the hurried leaves Swirl round your ankles and the shaking hedges That had flopped their catkin cuff-lace and green sleeves Are sleet-whipped bare. Dawn light began stealing Through the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling, Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones Millennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. And now the planet turns Earth brow and templed earth, the crowd grows still In the wired-off precinct of the burial mounds, Flight 104 from New York audible As it descends on schedule into Dublin, Boyne Valley Centre Car Park already full, Waiting for seedling light on roof and windscreen. And as in illo tempore people marked The king's gold dagger when he plunged it in To the hilt in unsown ground, to start the work Of the world again, to speed the plough And plant the riddled grain, we watch through murk And overboiling cloud for the milted glow Of sunrise, for an eastern dazzle To send first light like share-shine in a furrow Steadily deeper, farther available, Creeping along the floor of the passage grave To backstone and capstone, holding its candle Under the rock-piled roof and the loam above. Seamus Heaney
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Feb 03, 2014, 10:52
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Evening draws the colour From the blades that rest beside you. Rough hewn, scarred, Fresh from the crag. Now you know. The secret of the work Was always in the body. It took the stone to draw it out, To bring you to that elevated state and To make you in the process. An inheritance bestowed. Mike Pitts in his blog, Digging Deeper writes this morning that - Here’s a lovely thing. It’s a poem about an ancient place, by Mark Edmonds and Rose Ferraby – or as Mark describes it, “words by me, images by the two of us” – in the form of an illustrated book. It’s mostly the story of the making of a stone axe 6,000 years ago. A quarry high in the Lake District draws the maker up to find the right stone, where the axe is roughed out, then carried back down and finished; the description attempts to convey that this means more to the maker than the mere winning of a useful implement. Interleaved with this is the briefer story of (one assumes) a knowledgeable archaeologist who finds up there an abandoned, unfinished axe; he thinks he can beat the problem that defeated the neolithic knapper, and at the end succeeds. He descends with the axe, “Six thousand years in the making.” More on the book Stonework by Mark Edmonds and Rose Ferraby here.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
May 12, 2014, 10:59
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Over a hill the west wind loves, There lies a quiet glen, Far away from the roaring world, Far from the strife of men ; Out to the south a lordly wall Reared by no human hands, A cloud-dark wall that overlooks The windy heather lands. Crags to the north like fortress bold, A proud arrogant steep, That shelters from the raiding storms The winter-harassed sheep ; Out to the east a rising fell, Striped like a tiger’s skin, With raking flank of yellow grass, And ribs of darksome whin. And one grey rock, like pagan god, Solemn as death, and lone, That oft, maybe, the hill tribes made Their ancient worship stone ; The strange wild people of the past Have vanished race on race, And we, like shadows on the grass, Now pass before its face. Ammon Wrigley (1861-1946) Songs of a Moorland Parish, 1912. Rest, and photo of Millstone Edge at Standedge, Overlooking Ammon Wrigley’s birthplace in Saddleworth, on Andy Hemingway’s blog here.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Jun 24, 2014, 11:42
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Standing Stones* My father taught me to carve stone with stone, to caress formations so that curves lie in shadows, and the circling sun ripples their contours like muscles to your eyes I can lay hearts inside stone; surface nipples to suckle their unborn young. I can shape stones like ancient lovers that never touch, that whisper in each other's breath. I will teach my son how to hold his visions around the chipping stone, and he, his son, and all the way down the ancestral line until tools are metal that carve metal, and air. The standing stones whisper to me that seasons fall decade after decade, they weather the storms, yet grains fall softly, one per year, until one day they fall wholly and gently kiss, buried in forest amoungst centuries of fallen leaves, when my bloodline's sights are set in the distant stars and he carves away this Earth for fuel. Lynn Woollacott *Stone Circle at Kingarth, Isle of Bute, Scotland 'Standing Stones' first published in 'Reach Poetry Magazine, Issue 126',(Readers vote, 2nd place) republished in 'Quantum Leap Magazine'. Lynn’s website is here.
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Littlestone 5386 posts |
Apr 06, 2016, 10:45
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To A Fallen Cromlech And Thou at last art fall’n; Thou, who hast seen The storms and calms of twice ten hundred years. The naked Briton here has paused to gaze Upon thy pond’rous mass, ere bells were chimed, Or the throng’d hamlet smok’d with social fires. Whilst thou hast here repos’d, what numerous tribes, That breath’d the breath of life, have pass’d away. What wond’rous changes in th’affairs of men! Their proudest cities lowly ruins made; Battles, and sieges, empires lost and won; Whilst thou hast stood upon the silent hill A lonely monument of times that were. Lie, where thou art. Let no rude hand remove, Or spoil thee; for the spot is consecrate To thee, and Thou to it; and as the heart Aching with thoughts of human littleness Asks, without hope of knowing, whose the strength That poised thee here; so ages yet unborn (O! humbling, humbling thought !)may vainly seek, What were the race of men, that saw thee fall. Rev. Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858) More here.
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carol27 747 posts |
Apr 07, 2016, 09:16
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I've started reading through this great thread. I'm only up to 2005/6 so far! It is to be savoured & appreciated. Life & work interrupts, but I'm impatient to know wether or not the book / anthology came about?
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carol27 747 posts |
Apr 07, 2016, 10:00
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I fear the possible impermanence of web stuff; no doubt totally illogical:) I've just read the poem by Penelope Shuttle & you mentioned The Wise Wound; a book given to me at a tender age by my fantastic aunty Jean. The book turned my thinking about the processes we women go through completely around; transforming the "curse" into a celebratory, almost mystical experience! Well, sometimes! Of course other female friends thought I was barking! I still have it around somewhere.
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